When a Project Manager starts to plan the development of a new project, one important task is to identify the roles and responsibilities of your resources that will be required to deliver the project based upon the agreed timeline & budget.

You always need to have a very clear understanding of the availability of the resources that will be playing the roles throughout the project lifecycle.

It would be very frustrating to discover, during the execution of the project, that a key member of the team will not be available in the next week due to his/her vacation – which was already planned more than six months ago.

Some resources might be over allocated, and few underutilized.

Besides that you have to plan & assign tasks to each resource given their availability & responsibilities. That means if someone is only available 8 hours a day, then the project schedule should only reflect (at most) 8 hours of work on that person each day.

“Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the only thing he can’t afford to lose.” —Thomas Edison

But if you manage your resource planning & scheduling with traditional method, then you may end up with over allocating time to your resource. So that will badly affect your planning & subsequently your project timeline & budget.

So, to avoid problems with the resources not being available to perform the tasks under their responsibility, it is very important that all the information related to their availability need to be managed in a smart project management tool.

Not only that; you need to know

Q. How much time did my resources spent on the just concluded project?

Q. How do I know if specific resources will be available to me on specific dates in the near future?

Q. Which tasks consume the most of my teams’ time?

Q. Do I know how many hours can I bill on the current project?

Q. Will I meet my current project deadlines?

Q. Did I bill my client with the correct billable hours?

Q. How much time did my team spent on non-billable work?

Q. Did my team actually spent the hours they claim they did on the tasks?

Q. What is my current resource utilization?

With a smart project management tool Orangescrum, you can review how efficiently your resources are being used in your project, and whether you need to make any adjustments, by viewing their workloads and availability.

From Orangescrum, you can also get to know who has spent how much time & what the status of tasks & projects is.

Looking at our customer’s business need we have launched the Time Log Gold add-on.

This add-on helps you to check the availability of resources; track & log time, generate the resource utilization report & keep track of your payables along with your team’s time.

Resource Availability:

As I said earlier it is import for any business to know the availability of resources to manage their team in an efficient & effective way.

With this add-on, you can check who’s available for the day & who is not available. Red color here shows the non-availability of resources whereas the green color shows the resource is available for the day.

When you create a task & assign to a resource and if he is not available then it will show you the date when s/he will be available next and it’ll suggest the other resources available for that period.

Accordingly you have to change the resource or the date to assign the task to the same resource.

If the resource is available then you can assign the task the resource & keep a track of his spent time.

Time Log & Timer:

With the timer, you can track the time spent by the resource on a task. So you can generate a transparent and accurate invoice for your customer.

The resource need to start the timer whenever s/he starts a task & save the time as soon as the task is completed.

Even if you missed the timer, you can entry the time manually to your task from the Time entry option.

Billable & Non-billable:

Every project has tasks which may not to be added to the customer invoice. If you think your task is billable to add in customer’s invoice then mark it as billable otherwise leave the task as non-billable.

On the Time Log page, you can see how many hours are billable and how many hours are not.

This is the way you can build a trust on your customer which is essential for every business and deal.

Resource Utilization:

Like Resource Availability, resource utilization is also important. It shows finally how you have effectively managed your resources.

This report provides you the real time data of time spent per resource per task per project.

Time Log Export:

At any time you can export your Time Log & Resource Utilization data for your analysis or requirement.

About Orangescrum

As a software development company, we know the pain of managing projects via emails. We wanted a software/tool - to manage projects more efficiently, to have quick communications and to become more productive.